


Anne of Aglionby

by Keeperkeepkipsi



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 11:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21849091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keeperkeepkipsi/pseuds/Keeperkeepkipsi
Summary: A crossover between AoGG and TRC. Mainly just The Raven Boys, really. What if Anne was in the role of Blue? What would that change? How would she react to trees that talk back?
Comments: 9
Kudos: 9





	1. St. Mark's Eve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are only a handful of named locations in Henrietta that are confirmed to actually sit on the ley line. Skyline Drive Park is the one that has a parking fee, and is the most likely place for someone not already knowledgeable of ley lines to find one.

Anne turned over in her sleeping bag as quietly as possible. She wasn’t sure what was keeping her awake: the nearness of Diana, sleeping next to her; the thought of Marilla and Matthew asleep at home; or the forest of Skyline Drive Park just outside the thin canvas of the tent.

They were celebrating the one-year anniversary of Anne’s arrival in Henrietta. Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, both unmarried and childless, found their home empty with just the two of them, and the prospect of growing older together as siblings was less appealing as they both felt their health deteriorate. They decided to adopt a child; rather, a teenager, because neither of them had the energy to care for and entertain a very young and dependent being. The group home that responded to them first was located in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Anne arrived in a flurry of excitement and gratitude, a fifteen-year-old with enough energy for two, or five.

Despite how quickly Anne had charmed the Cuthberts, she had found it difficult to assimilate into Henrietta’s public high school. A flighty, imaginative soul like hers did not mix well with any group of cynical, hormonal teenagers. Diana had been her savior. Compassionate, elegant Diana, whose friendliness toward Anne had paved the way to general acceptance of her presence. Diana, who had supported Anne’s idea of a camping trip to celebrate this anniversary, who had laid out the finer points of the weekend, who now slept soundly beside her while Ruby and Jane shared the tent next to them.

It was no use musing on the past or the present. Anne was certainly awake now, and the sounds of nature filled her ears, filtering through the tent’s flap. Carefully and quietly, she slid out of her sleeping bag, an eye on Diana the whole time. Her friend was a heavy sleeper, but Anne didn’t trust herself not to slip somehow and wake her. When she reached the tent’s flap, she opened it just enough to slip out, and stepped into the cool April night. The wind was brisk up here in the mountains, but nothing like the freezing bite of Canada’s early spring. Here, she could feel winter steadily losing the last of its grip. 

Anne wandered to the far edge of the clearing, past all the tents and to the tree line. She walked forward, feeling as though she had crossed a boundary, as all things felt different in the dark of night. As the trees closed around her, she saw less and less, the moon and stars struggling to pierce the canopy of leaves above her head. Still, the closeness of the trunks and branches did not feel claustrophobic to Anne. They were comforting, like friends whose shoulders brushed against hers while she walked.

“Did we meet during the daytime?” she asked the trees in a breathy whisper. “Are you asleep, like my friends back there, or wide awake and restless as I am?”

If there was a response, which there usually wasn’t, it was lost in the stiff wind that blew, rattling the branches and rustling the leaves. Anne was not discouraged, because she had done this plenty of times before, and she never truly expected a response. Even the Snow Queen, the first tree she really had a kinship with, never talked back.

“I am Anne Shirley, formerly of Avonlea, now of Henrietta,” she said, walking taller as she introduced herself. “I cannot speak for the trees on Prince Edward Island, but I’m sure they send their regards.”

Somewhere in the distant, an owl cried. The sound raised goosebumps all over Anne’s body. Everything was awake tonight. She was certain the trees could hear her, nearly certain they could understand her. She breathed in the chill, imagining that her own skin was being glazed with frost just as the leaves and grass would be come morning.

“I will always be partial to my oldest friend, the Snow Queen,” she announced softly, “but do any of you have names?”

She waited for something to come to her. There was a commanding oak to her right, drawing her eyes even in the dim shadows of midnight, that she was certain must have a name. As she reached inside herself for something appropriate, she thought she heard a voice on the wind.

“Gansey.”

She turned in a circle, casting her eyes about despite the lack of visibility. 

“Hello?” she called, loud now, because she wasn’t addressing the trees anymore. “Is someone there?”

When the wind blew, she breathed deeply, all senses on alert now, and caught the unmistakable scent of mint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is short because it is more of a prologue. I'm almost done with writing this, so hopefully beginning to post will motivate me to push through the last few chapters!


	2. Ghost stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anne relays what she heard in the forest to the girls. None of them believe her, but Diana pounces on the opportunity to visit the psychic house.

Anne was not well rested when she woke up the next morning. She should consider herself lucky, she figured, that she got any sleep at all. Over their breakfast of powdered donuts and marshmallows, Ruby and Jane also complained about their lack of sleep, due mostly to their unfamiliarity with sleeping on the ground. Diana, unsurprisingly, got the most sleep out of all of them.

“You were so deep asleep,” Anne commented, “that you didn’t even stir when I left the tent.”

“You went outside in the middle of the night?” Diana exclaimed, concern spiking her voice.

“Only into the trees a bit,” Anne reassured her with a pat on the hand. “Besides, there’s nothing more dangerous than ticks in this forest, and I promise I was careful. Oh, but listen to this: I swear I heard someone else out there.”

“‘Nothing more dangerous than ticks,’” Diana repeated, deadpan with her arms crossed.

“They were far off, probably another camper, but the weird thing is, I couldn’t place the direction. The wind didn’t carry that voice to me. There was no echo. It was like it was right inside my ear, but also coming from the other side of the mountain at the same time.” Anne was breathless with the memory of chill, minty air.

“Why didn’t you tell this story last night?” Ruby asked, evidently thinking this was just another ghost story.

“Because it hadn’t happened yet,” Anne replied tartly.

“Anne,” Jane broke in gently, “you have a wild imagination. Are you sure you weren’t just hearing something because you wanted to?”

“We are here to celebrate after all,” Diana added, “and you never go halfway with your emotions. Maybe you just needed something special, something otherworldly to happen, and your brain provided something for you.”

Anne scowled. “So none of you believe me.”

The table was silent, amused by the story but wary of Anne’s temper.

“What did the voice say?” asked Ruby. Anne brightened significantly.

“I was talking to this one tree and trying to- don’t snort at me Diana, you know I do this-” Anne threw a quick glare at her skeptical friend, “and I was trying to come up with a name for it. That’s when I heard the voice. It just said one thing: ‘Gansey.’ At first I thought the universe was giving me an answer, but then I realized how far away the voice sounded. It must have traveled a long way to reach me.” Truthfully, Anne’s first thought was that Gansey wasn’t an appropriate name for a regal-looking oak tree, but the version she told her friends was far more romantic.

“So you’re sure it wasn’t the tree talking to you, at least,” Jane said, barely holding back a well-meaning smirk.

“Just because they can’t respond doesn’t mean I’m going to stop talking to trees,” Anne shot back, and the table erupted into giggles. Diana gasped for breath, then perked up and poked Anne in the arm.

“Oh! Anne, I just remembered something you’ll love. Josie told me the other day about a group of psychics who live in town. Maybe you should ask them about this voice.”

Psychics. People who actually were connected to the greater universe, who could communicate with more than just other humans. The concept was so ethereal that Anne was simultaneously pulled to it, and pulled back by her own ordinariness.

“Are you sure they’re for real?” Jane asked, ever sensible. “Psychics tend to be kinda sketchy. I didn’t think you believed in anything like that.”

Diana tilted her head noncommittally. “Real or not, it’s harmless for a little fun. I was thinking of going over for a love reading. Anne, do you want to come with and ask about your little voice?”

Anne considered. The psychics might be more likely to take her seriously. On the other hand, they might tell her that was she heard was indeed just a trick of the mind rather than legitimate paranormal phenomenon, and she wouldn’t be able to argue with them as the experts.

“I suppose if it will solve the matter one way or another, I’ll go with you,” she answered.

Diana bounced and smiled brightly. “Ruby? Jane?”

“Waste of money,” Jane said, shaking her head.

Ruby had gone quiet as soon as psychics were mentioned. “I don’t think I’d be very comfortable doing that,” she hedged in a small voice. 

Diana nodded magnanimously. “I’ll drive the two of you home, then, and then Anne and I will go see the psychics. It’s decided!”

With the matter decided, they packed up their camp, taking their time to finish off their package of donuts. As they left the clearing, Anne turned back toward the tree line and bowed deeply.

“Thank you for your company and hospitality,” she murmured while the other girls waited for her to catch up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had the choice of one long chapter or two shorter ones, so I decided to break this one into two. 300 Fox Way will be next!


	3. Two of Cups

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hope everyone had a good Christmas! Now back to business as usual: Anne and Diana visit 300 Fox Way.

After dropping off Ruby and Jane at their houses, Diana and Anne arrived at 300 Fox Way. Diana strode up to the door to ring the doorbell, Anne trailing behind. Her feet felt heavier the closer she got. Would she be proven right or wrong? Was it all in her head? Did she want it to be real or not?

The door opened and a light, cloudy figure appeared. She brushed her mane of blonde curls away from her face with one hand while holding the door open with the other.

“You’re right on time,” she said in the softest voice Anne had ever heard. She was immediately enamored. “Come on in.”

She led them through a tight maze of multi colored halls until they entered a dim, cluttered room. Two other women sat in chairs, idly talking. They stopped talking when Anne and Diana entered the room. Their eyes were squarely on Anne. She took a small step closer to Diana and willed her heart to slow down.

“I’m Persephone,” their cloudy guide said, “and this is Maura,” she pointed to the short, stocky one who was sizing her up observantly, “and Calla.” She pointed to the one with purple hair and lips who was sizing her up aggressively.

“I’m Diana, and this is Anne,” her beloved friend, saint that she was, introduced them.

“Which of you wants to go first?” Maura asked, looking at Anne. The two girls glanced at each other. Diana saw the deer-in-headlights look in Anne’s eyes and turned back to the three women.

“I will, if you don’t mind. I’d like to have a love reading done.” Diana blushed graciously, having brought the attention of the room firmly on her.

Calla suddenly had a deck of cards in her hands. “I can do that for you. How about the two of you come sit across from me?” She gestured at the table in the middle of the room. Anne and Diana obliged her, Diana sitting directly in front of Calla and Anne beside her.

Calla held out her deck to Diana. “Shuffle these, and concentrate on the question you’re asking. Stop when you feel ready.”

Diana took the cards delicately in her hands and began to shuffle by taking out sections of cards and putting them somewhere else in the deck. She glanced at Anne with a sheepish look, and Anne squeezed her shoulder in support. Calla narrowed her eyes.

“I’m going to have to ask you not to touch her during the reading. Your energy will interfere with hers and influence the cards.” Anne immediately retracted her hand and stared at her lap, blushing fiercely.

Diana shuffled the cards for an entire minute, just to be thorough, before handing the deck back to Calla. She cut the deck as instructed and chose the left half. Calla began laying out the cards facing her.

“The Queen of Coins and the Knight of Coins,” Calla explained. “You and your partner are both very grounded in practical things. Stability, loyalty, but not much imagination between the two of you. You won’t be frivolous, but you will be honest with each other.” Diana was entranced, her eyes flicking from the Queen to the Knight and back again. 

Calla continued. “The Eight of Coins represents what brings you together. In this case it’s hard work. You’ll both put in the effort to make this relationship happen. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Temperance will keep you together. It’s hard to bring either of you to extremes. No matter how much you might stray apart, you’ll come back to what you know. The Seven of Cups represents your obstacles. He won’t be the only one who catches your eye. You may not be the only one who catches his. You’ll have to see clearly through the temptation of choices to know which one is best for you.”

Calla smiled when she laid down the last card, a real smile that made her look ten years younger. “The Two of Cups. You have nothing to worry about. As long as you two find your way to each other, you’ll be two peas in a pod. Lucky girl.” Now Calla sat back and returned to her sharp smirk, though obviously she was satisfied with the awestruck look on Diana’s face. Her eyes were wide and practically glowing. Anne wasn’t sure how much of it she believed, but for Diana’s sake, she hoped the reading was true.

“My turn,” Maura announced, standing from her chair. She was staring at Anne again. Possibly she had been the entire reading. “And yours.” She plopped herself into the chair opposite Anne.

Suddenly Anne only had control over forty percent of her voice, so when she finally spoke, it came out scratchy and trembling. “I was wondering if you could tell me anything about hearing a voice in the woods.”

“Are you in a horror movie?” Calla quipped. Maura shushed her with a sharp wave of her hand.

Anne continued, rallying her courage. “I was in Skyline Drive with my friends last night, and when I went outside, I swear I heard a voice, and the air changed.”

“Changed how?”

“It seemed colder, and darker, and it smelled like mint.”

This caught Maura’s attention; her eyes sharpened and narrowed. “Mint?”

Anne nodded, gaining traction. “And all the voice said was “Gansey.”

Dead silence reigned as Maura glanced at Calla. Calla stood and left the room. Maura turned back to Anne. “I’m going to do a reading for you, if that’s alright.”

“Of course,” Anne said, although she wasn’t really that certain. Maura took out her own tarot deck and slid it over to Anne.

“Shuffle,” she ordered. Feeling self-conscious, as if her whole body was turning red to match her hair, Anne slid the deck around on the table and mixed up the cards, haphazardly pushing them back together and then spreading them out again. She concentrated on the memory of the voice in her ear, like it was speaking somewhere else but being heard in that forest. She tried to remember at which exact point she began to smell mint. She pushed the cards back together one last time, folding them in neatly, and handed the deck back to Maura.

“Cut the deck and choose a half,” she instructed. Anne did so, choosing the right half.

Maura laid out ten cards for Anne.

“Knight of Cups,” she said, nodding like she was almost impressed. “You certainly don’t turn down friendship. But you don’t have a lot of confidence in the charisma that brings friendships to you,” she continued, tapping the Eight of Swords.

“Luckily you’ve got a few stable friendships to support you right now. You want more than that, however; you want to fall in love. You’ve graduated from being the Ace of Cups; you’re no longer a little baby bird looking for someone to love you. You’re becoming instead the Ace of Wands, getting ready for an adventure.” Maura frowned at the Seven of Swords, somehow looking like her own question had been answered. “Not everything around you is what it seems. There is a liar in your midst, and it might be you. Things are about to get shaken up around here,” she said, pointing to the Tower, “at least for you. You’ll be afraid of balancing two parts of yourself, and while each tries to pull you in a different direction, you’ll go nowhere. And finally…”

Maura trailed off pointedly, looking at the Death card sitting in the outcome position. She worried her lip between her teeth and stared at it for a long moment. “Have you ever kissed anyone?” she asked suddenly, looking Anne directly in the eye.

Anne nearly had whiplash from the change in topic. “N-no?”

“Good.” Anne felt a different kind of heat rushing to her face, but Maura continued. “You’ve got a very interesting type of energy, Anne. You make everything stronger. But that can be dangerous to some people. I knew when you came in that you had a strong fate, but I couldn’t see it clearly. Now, because of the Lovers and Death showing up in this reading, I can tell you this much: If you kiss your true love, he’ll die.”

Anne stared back at Maura, mouth parted but saying nothing. How could someone, even a psychic, say such a thing with so much conviction? Were all prophecies so specific?

“Please tell me you’re joking,” Diana said hoarsely. She looked horrified, all of the hope from her own reading wiped away.

“I wouldn’t joke about this,” said Maura. “In fact, I’m telling you this because of this voice you heard.”

Anne held her breath. “How does it relate?”

“Last night was St. Mark’s Eve,” Maura began. “It is the night when the spirits of those who are bound to die within the year walk the length of the corpse road. The ley line. It has many names. The point is, the boy named Gansey was among the spirits we saw last night, and his spirit acted strangely. But you’re not a psychic, are you?”

“No, I don’t believe so,” Anne said with a shrug, ducking into her shoulders for comfort against her sudden anxiety.

“There are only two reasons someone who isn’t psychic might see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve. The first possibility is that he’s your true love.” Maura raised her eyebrows pointedly as Diana looked sharply at Anne. Hope crested and crashed as the realization hit Anne. No matter who her true love is, she’d never be able to kiss him.

“What’s the other possibility?” Hopefully this one would make more sense, but Maura’s face said otherwise.

“That you’ll be the one who kills him.”

“What?” Diana yelled, standing up from her chair as fiercely as she could. “Anne would never!”

For her part, Anne was chilled to the bone by the suggestion. Obviously it was much worse to be a murderer than to have to settle for less than true love, but were those really her only options?

“I want you to have this information,” Maura said in a steady, calming voice, “because if what I saw in your reading is true, it could very easily be both. So I’m going to advise you not to kiss anyone, especially not Gansey.”

“I’m just supposed to give up on kissing for the rest of my life?” Anne asked, with burning eyes from sudden despair. “Even if I fall in love, I can’t show it, because it might kill him. So I’m destined to be alone and miserable, is that it?”

Maura’s face softened. “It’s a promise, not a guarantee. I’m giving you this information so you won’t be caught off guard, and so you can make your own decision on how to act on it. But if you were my daughter, I wouldn’t want you kissing anyone, just to be safe.”

Anne slumped down in her seat, trying not to cry at the loss of her strongest and longest-held hope. “Diana,” she said, reaching for her friend’s hand, squeezing tight, “promise me you will find your true love, as promised here, so that at least one of us can be happy. I’ll get my happiness from yours, since I will be denied my own.”

Diana laid her own hand over Anne’s, smooth and warm. “You don’t need to give up hope, Anne, but I will promise you anyway. We will both be happy, whatever form that happiness takes.”

Maura smiled wearily at the two girls. “It’s good that you have each other, at least. I’ve done all I can for you.”

Diana turned back to Maura, ladylike and formal. “How much do we owe you for the readings?”

Maura’s smile turned sideways for a second. Awkwardly, she answered, “I can’t take your money in good conscience after what I’ve told you.”

While Diana tried to pay Maura, and Maura refused stalwartly to accept it, Anne wandered back out to the hall. The cloudy blonde, Persephone, was leaning against the doorframe to what was probably a kitchen. She gazed aimlessly at the ceiling. Anne tried to walk into her line of sight to avoid startling her.

“Hello?” she began in a murmur. Persephone’s head and eyes swiveled smoothly to face her.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can tell you,” she said. Her tone was sad, but her face was not. Perhaps she had more important concerns than the romantic troubles of two teenage girls.

Anne and Diana left 300 Fox Way in mixed spirits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took me so long to do the readings. I really hope it was worth it.


	4. A Walk in the Woods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anne needs some time to clear her head after school, but Henrietta forests aren't really designed for peace of mind.

Anne was barely present in her classes the next day. She stared out the window all through chemistry, thinking of the smell of mint on a cold night. Every time a boy spoke in her class, she listened closely to his voice. Did it sound like the one who named himself on the wind? Was that the voice of someone who was fated to die within the year?

Diana only shared English with her, and squeezed her hand when she sat down next to her. Ever the diplomat, she did not gloat over her promising romance. She never even mentioned the reading. Of course, it was easier to go through the school day normally if you hadn’t been told you have the power to kill the person you love the most.

Even with her best friend’s unrelenting support, Anne couldn’t help but feel despondent. What was the point of falling in love if it was doomed by a literal kiss of death? In an abstract sense it could be considered romantic, but when you got up close it just felt cheap. It was a broken heart with no happy memories to fall back on. And knowing all this, Anne still wanted to fall in love. It just wasn’t that easy to give up on a dream she’d had since childhood. She wanted to find someone who made her happy like nothing else could, someone who would love her just as fiercely, someone who she could marry and grow old with. But what was all of that without even having her first kiss? Not enough.

Maybe she wasn’t meant for all of that after all. The thought had come to her time and time again over the years, but Anne had always pushed it away with the certainty that nothing was stopping her from finding love. Now it seemed there was a convincing argument. Was it even wise to let herself fall in love, knowing what could happen? Could she put her true love through that torture? Could she do it to herself?

By the end of the school day, Anne’s head was pounding from the stress of taking notes with this hurricane raging in her thoughts. Her legs felt like they were weighed down with bricks when she finally got to her bike. She might not even make the ride home. Not that she felt like going home right now. The only thing that felt good in this moment was the sunlight cast on her face through the trees. Anne tilted her head back and breathed deeply for a few moments, gathering her energy.

She wouldn’t go home immediately. She texted Marilla that she was staying to hang out with friends for a bit, then got on her bike and rode off school grounds. There wasn’t much in the way of a bike path, but it was a simple enough task to get away from the most bustling area of Henrietta. She biked toward the hills, into the woods until the ground was no longer paved, until it was no longer level or smooth enough to bike on so she had to get off and start walking. Anne generally trusted her sense of direction, but these woods were thick enough to make her wary, so she kept the uphill portion on her left and the downhill portion on her right in the hope of retracing her steps to get home.

Anne walked and rolled her bike in as straight a line as she could manage, picking up her bike when necessary, until she saw something in the distance that was definitely not a tree. It was stone, but not a forest stone. A wall of stone, which had clearly been placed there by humans a very, very long time ago. Anne came up to it, but stopped before she could enter the area it enclosed. There was only a gate off to the side, but she had no desire to go in, really. She gently rested her bike against the stone wall and began to pace slowly around the perimeter.

It was hard to say what the place used to be; there was so little of it left. The scattered remains of masonry made Anne wonder if it was destroyed by natural or human forces. It couldn’t have been very big to begin with. And if there had been any other buildings near it at the time it was used, they were long gone now.

The back of the wall, as Anne assumed it was, was dark from the shade, and much cooler. It was quiet. She could not hear any birdsong, no insect buzzing, no toads croaking or squirrels running around. Even the trees seemed silent. There was no path to speak of, but Anne found herself walking further into the trees, sliding through whichever gap was the biggest. The feeling she had was the opposite of feeling watched; it was as if no one, nothing, not even God was watching her right now. No movement in these minutes would be recorded in anyone’s memory but hers.

Anne was so busy looking up and around that she didn’t look down until her foot hit something hard and smooth, too smooth to be a branch or even a large stone. She looked down and saw a bone. It was hellishly dirty, closer to brown than white, but clearly human. It was large, maybe from an arm. Anne froze, a mix of nausea and adrenaline making it hard to stay standing. Now that she saw one bone, she could not help but see the rest. There was an entire skeleton sitting here among the dirt and leaves and sticks. Inside what must be the ribcage, there was an Aglionby patch. The private boys’ school in Henrietta. He had died young.

Instantly, Anne heard the name Gansey in her head. This couldn’t be him, obviously; Gansey was still alive, at least for now. This skeleton looked old. Not decades old, but certainly years. Still, Anne couldn’t stop thinking about the boy’s voice in her ears. This boy had died young, as a student; if it could happen to one, it could happen to another.

Anne pulled out her phone with trembling hands, nearly dropping it. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to pick it back up if it hit this ground. She only had a sliver of service. She considered going back to the stone wall, where the phone signal might be better, but it seemed like once this scene was out of her sight, she wouldn’t believe it was real anymore. She placed an emergency call to 911 to report the body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year!


	5. Breaking News

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gansey and the boys appear properly! And take the news about Noah about as well as they did they first time.

Richard Campbell Gansey III sped back to Monmouth Manufacturing in his blazing orange Camaro, his passenger seat occupied by a bag of Combos and a newspaper. He was not a frequent violator of speed limits, as he preferred to leave that to Ronan, but right now his speed was set to match his mood. He couldn’t quite put a word to his mood; it wasn’t quite frightened, or alarmed, or angry. It was his head spinning, gears turning so fast they were putting out smoke. It was his jaw clenched so hard that even consciously unclenching it could barely be maintained for more than two seconds. It was his foot pressed to the gas less out of a desire for speed than of his knee being locked and his leg tense from a kind of sick adrenaline.

Noah had disappeared last night. It was not unusual for Noah to retreat into his room for lengths at a time, being the shy puppy-creature that he was, but this was different. He was not in Monmouth. His room was empty, sparse as always, not a single sign of life there. Neither Gansey nor Ronan saw him leave; they had been in their own rooms at the time. Gansey had simply noticed Noah’s absence. How, he couldn’t say. He just suddenly became aware that Noah had left the building, with no memory of when this happened or any sound that Noah might have made.

Noah’s disappearance did not call for the same concern that Ronan’s would have, especially having no precedent, so Gansey and Ronan had decided to give him a full day to get whatever this was out of his system. Surely he would come back.

Now Gansey wasn’t so sure. He had stopped by the convenience store on the way back from Aglionby, seeking a snack high in sodium and saturated fat so he could properly focus on his homework and on analyzing the recording of his voice saying his name the night of April 24th. It was just by chance that he had glanced down at the newspaper rack, but the first thing that jumped into his vision was Noah’s face. Noah’s face, printed next to an article titled “Henrietta Student Discovers Body of Murdered Aglionby Student” in bold, black print. Gansey read the first three lines of the article, but his eyes kept returning to the image of Noah’s face, brighter than he knew it, smiling, with smooth, unblemished cheeks.

Now he parked at Monmouth and threw himself from the car to the door. He prayed Ronan was in a mood to come out of his room. Racing up the stairs, he called for him.

“Ronan!” he called, pounding on the bedroom door, feeling a strangling sort of dread climb up his throat. He paced in quick steps across the hall. He glanced at Noah’s door; it was open, the space as empty as if it had never been occupied. He banged on Ronan’s door again, trying to hold back his panic.

When Ronan finally opened his door, he took one look at Gansey’s face, evidently full of panic, and swung it open wide.

“What is it?” he asked. Gansey just shoved the newspaper into his hand and waited for him to read it. Ronan’s eyebrows came low when he saw Noah’s picture, then spiked nearly to the edge of his buzzed hair when he read the headline. His eyes scanned the text of the article while he said nothing, reading the whole thing as Gansey had been unable to do.

“He left sometime last night,” Gansey said, unable to bear the silence. “The body was found yesterday.”

“Well he sure as shit didn’t die yesterday,” Ronan grumbled, rereading some part of the article. “‘The police estimated the bones to be around seven years old’” he quoted. “They only identified him because his wallet was there. Noah Czerny.”

The matter-of-fact way Ronan summarized the article made Gansey feel like he was going to have a psychotic break. “We went to Nino’s with him last week! How can he be dead seven years? I’m calling Adam,” Gansey said, marginally calmed by the prospect of a task and a voice of reason. Hopefully Adam wasn’t at work. No, Adam was always at work. Hopefully he could leave early. It was an emergency.

“Gansey, I’m at work,” Adam said as soon as he picked up on his end.

“I need you here at Monmouth. It’s an emergency.”

“Is it Ronan?” Adam asked, his voice now full of wary concern.

“No,” Gansey answered. “It’s Noah.”

“Noah?” Adam repeated, clearly of the belief that Noah did not have emergencies. “Do you really need me over there right now? I’m in the middle of a job.”

“Yes, right now,” Gansey said. “Finish what you can and get here. I feel like I’m going insane, and I can’t explain over the phone.”

Adam sighed heavily over the phone, but assured Gansey he would be there as soon as possible. Twenty minutes later, he was inside and reading the paper with an academic furrow between his brows. He was silent for a long few minutes after he finished.

“I’m not sure what I’m looking at, Gansey,” he finally said.

“It’s a fucking obituary,” Ronan cut in, but his scowl was off in a way that suggested he wasn’t as certain as he sounded.

“But Noah’s been living with you guys here for how long now?” Adam asked, looking between Ronan and Gansey, who looked uncomfortably unsure. “At least as long as I’ve known you. So are you saying he’s been dead all that time?”

“I told you that,” Noah said.

Suddenly he was among them, slouching in the doorway to his room, staring at the three of them with a wide-eyed hangdog expression.

“I told you,” he repeated to their gaping faces. It was strange to look at him; he was normally a solid presence, so like one of them that they had never questioned him. Now, they simultaneously saw him and the room behind him. He was a hologram made of fog, and the shape of his skull was too apparent through the skin of his face.

“Noah…” Gansey began swallowing hard, “how did you die?”

Noah simply shook his head.

“Have you really been dead for seven years?” Adam asked.

Noah nodded slowly, staring at the floor.

“Who killed you?” Ronan demanded, staring at him hard. Noah returned his stare with a doleful one of his own, and shook his head once more.

Gansey held an arm out in front of Ronan, telling him to back off, as he took a step toward Noah. Their faded friend shrunk further into the doorway. “Noah, you seemed so… alive before. Did something happen when they found you? To make you… like this?” Which meant faded instead of opaque, shadowed even in light, sallow and sunken and skeletal.

If Noah was a turtle, he’d be fully inside his shell by now. Instead, he just ducked his head as far into his shoulders as it would go, refusing to look Gansey in the eye when he answered. “They took me away. They put me somewhere else. I don’t have enough strength right now.” He punctuated his point by fading away completely, leaving his room once again perfectly empty.

“Took him away from what?” Adam asked.

Gansey took the newspaper back from Ronan. He finally read the whole article, focusing on where Noah’s bones were found. Deep in the woods in the foothills, not yet the mountains proper, several yards past the closest landmark, some decrepit ruins of what might have been a church. Slowly, Gansey moved to his desk and sat down, pulling out his journal. He opened to a map of Henrietta that he had annotated with possible locations of the ley line. He didn’t know where this supposed church was, but the general area of the woods was along the general path that he was assuming the line followed. It was enough for him.

“The line,” he announced. Without turning, he felt Adam and Ronan’s focus turn sharply onto him. “Noah’s bones were on the ley line. That’s what gave him so much strength that we thought he was alive.”

“And now that his bones have been discovered, they’ve been taken off the ley line?” Adam guessed. Gansey nodded fervently. Really, Noah’s behavior made much more sense in the context of his being a ghost. The odd hours he kept, his refusal to eat, the smudge on his cheek, now obviously the memory of the assault that killed him.

The only thing it didn’t explain was why he chose to live at Monmouth. Why he became friends with Gansey and Ronan. Only Noah could answer that question, but he wasn’t here right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope whoever's reading this is enjoying so far!


	6. Memorial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gansey, Ronan, and Adam meet Noah's family, and a girl none of them have seen before. Gansey is as good at first impressions as ever.

There was a memorial ceremony held for Noah two days later. With the attention his death and discovery brought to Aglionby, Gansey had no trouble volunteering himself, Adam, and Ronan to attend as the school’s representatives, to give their condolences to the family. 

Gansey could barely reconcile in his head the prayer spoken in Noah’s honor with the memory of the quiet presence that had often kept him company through sleepless nights. The scene was both real and unreal. Noah’s family, his parents and two sisters, sat in the front pew of the church, in various stages of crying. Ronan sat perfectly upright, his gaze steady on the priest, while Adam slumped, awkward and working to stay present.

After the prayer, each of Noah’s family members spoke about him to the intimate crowd of extended family and students that had gathered. His father spoke of a teenager who was nothing like him; easygoing, with a tendency for off-color jokes, and preference for sports that resided in the streets rather than on a field or on a court. When Noah was alive, his father had hoped he’d settle down and use his charm to make himself successful. His voice broke when he wished that Noah had been given more of his life, no matter what he might have made of it.

Noah’s mother went to the lectern dry-eyed, stony in her grief. She recalled Noah as a child; he was an energetic, squirming little boy, one who couldn’t stand or sit still, whether he was in school, in a restaurant, or in church. She remembered his smile, which never changed from the day he was born. He always had that smile when he ran around, just when he was about to get into trouble. That smile, at least, Gansey could see on the Noah he knew. It was the one he made when Ronan cracked a joke that only the two of them enjoyed.

The older of his sisters described the Noah that broke rules, less out of a sense of rebellion than a desire for attention, for surprising people, delivering the unexpected. He was unfettered, the boy who jumped on tables and danced. He was the Aglionby equivalent of a Bacchan cultist.

The younger sister described a Noah who was the closest thing to the one Gansey and the others knew. The Noah who was a wonderful older brother, ruffling hair and giving half-baked advice that never made sense until seen in hindsight. The Noah who was loyal to a fault, who never let a bond die once it was made. Once you had Noah, there was no getting rid of him. By the time she said this, she was crying steadily. Gansey allowed exactly two of his own tears to fall before inhaling steadily and pressing the rest back. This was not the time or place for him to display his own grief.

When the service concluded, Gansey, Ronan, and Adam waited, standing in their row, as everyone else gave their condolences to the Czernys. Among them was a slight, redheaded girl who approached as hesitantly as a feral cat.

“Adam, do you know who that is?” Gansey asked. He certainly didn’t, and there was no way Ronan would. Adam knew a bit more of the townsfolk than either of them, but his face was blank as he studied the redhead.

“No clue.”

Gansey decided now was the time to approach, ostensibly to claim their place as the next to speak with the family. As he and the boys neared, the girl finally got Mrs. Czerny’s attention. It took her a few tries to speak clearly, by which point Gansey was in earshot.

“I’m the one who found him, ma’am,” she said in a tremulous voice, gray eyes wide like cloudy marbles. She looked ready to cry just from introducing herself. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Mrs. Czerny took the girl’s hands, and thanked her. The two sisters each embraced her, a gesture of both gratitude and comfort. The girl looked like she was having a religious experience.

Gansey strode forward, determined to make his own introduction before this girl left. She was important, he felt; and if he didn’t speak to her now, he might never see her again.

“Mrs. Czerny,” he spoke, commanding her attention with his signature Aglionby politeness, “please allow me to extend my condolences, on behalf of Aglionby Academy as well as myself and my friends. I wish I had known-” that he was so much more than who he is now, that he’s been dead the whole time I’ve known him, that all this was taken away from him- “I wish I had known him the way you did. He seems like an incredible soul. Aglionby is poorer without him.”

Mrs. Czerny nodded vaguely and shook his hand. “He went to that school years ago; if he was still alive today you likely wouldn’t know him anyway.” Her voice was oddly calm, brittle with control. Only the thinnest current of sadness was allowed to run through it. She looked from him to Ronan to Adam; three mismatched gentlemen. “What are your names?”

Glancing back, Ronan and Adam both stared, appointing him speaker. He turned back to Mrs. Czerny. “These are my fellow students, Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish, and I am Richard Gansey the Third, but you can just call me Gansey.”

He saw bright movement in the corner of his eye; the redhead turning sharply to stare at him. Her gaze was scrutinizing, nearly appalled; what had he done to offend her? Perhaps she felt he had interrupted her, upstaged her while she was comforting the family of the boy whose remains she had found. And her was he, a golden messenger boy for the school that Noah had attended seven years ago. Of course she had a more valid place speaking to this family than he had. 

He stepped back, nodding to the Czerny family, expecting them to turn back to her, but she had already turned and was walking swiftly to the doors. He excused himself and the other two and followed after her, pacing himself so as not to cause alarm.

When they were all out of the church and close enough to the redhead to avoid having to shout, Gansey called to her as politely as possible. She turned around to look, but as soon as she saw him she spun around and walked faster. At this point, Gansey gave up and broke into a run.

“Wait,” he said as he came up alongside her, gently touching her arm. She flinched back but stopped. She eyed him warily.

“I wanted to apologize for interrupting you back there,” Gansey started, hoping politeness would be the right opener. “I should have let you have your time with them before barging in myself.”

She raised her chin sharply. “It’s fine, really. I need to get home now anyway. She gunned for the parking lot, Gansey following, until she reached a bike and stopped to unlock it.

“Can I give you a ride?” he offered. He was rewarded with a glare that would make Ronan proud and a bloom of pink across her face.

“What do you want from me, Richard Gansey the Third?” she asked with an arch to her voice.

Uneasy with his full name being thrown at him by a girl at least half a foot shorter than him, he floundered for one second before asking, “What’s your name?”

“Anne Shirley,” she replied, standing poised with her bike.

“Well, Anne, I wanted to ask you,” and there was no easy way to say it, “where you found Noah’s bones.”

Anne’s eyes ignited with such an indignant rage that Gansey felt a volcano must be erupting somewhere, even if it wasn’t in Virginia. Perhaps he should have built up to that question.

“You have the gall to ask me that,” she began in a measured, low tone, “not ten minutes after the memorial ceremony for this boy? Even his family did not ask me that. They have no desire to know any more than they already do about the place where their son was murdered. But you do? Why? Are you junior detectives? Going to solve the crime? As far as I’m aware, that’s the job of the police.”

Behind him, Ronan snorted. “Like they could do a better job,” he muttered. Adam smacked his arm. Gansey looked at them helplessly. After a second, Adam stepped up to the plate.

“We actually do know something that might help the police,” he said, and Gansey admired the way he lied in his soft drawl, “but we need to see exactly where his bones were found to be certain.”

Anne arched a brow at him, less hostile, more intrigued. “What kind of something?”

Adam glanced at Gansey. “We might know why he died.”

“Blunt trauma to the head, according to the police. His face was smashed in.” She was trying very hard to be blunt, but her hands started shaking as she described it. Gansey reminded himself that she saw the evidence of the trauma firsthand.

“He means why he was killed,” Ronan cut in, “not how he was killed.”

Anne stared coolly at him. She had no response.

“Do you go to Henrietta High School?” Gansey asked.

Anne nodded. “Yes. Why?”

“If I drive there after school tomorrow, would you come with me to show us the place?”

It took a long moment of staring for Anne to make a decision. Throughout it, she seemed to desire nothing more than to turn and forget this interaction. It made her answer all the more surprising.

“I’m not going to school tomorrow. You can pick me up at the bus stop near my house. Gable and Green.” She swept a stone-gray stare over the three of them. “Once you’ve seen the place, it had better be all you need from me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	7. Retrace Your Steps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anne takes the boys to the run-down church and has a supernatural experience.

As promised, Anne stood on the corner of Green St. and Gable Place, waiting for Gansey. She heard an anemic growl about a minute before a bright orange, beaten up sports car came around the road. She couldn’t help but feel this was what she would look like if she were a car. Orange, unattractive, its appearance making an irrevocable impression before anything can redeem it.

A window rolled down and Ronan glared out at her. Adam leaned over pushed open the door to the backseat.

“Ready to go, Anne?” Gansey called politely from the driver’s seat.

Anne slid into the car seat without a word, trying to resist the urge to hunch her shoulders. “You’d better not be dragging me into anything illegal,” she said. “I am a woman of principles, and I will report you to the police.”

Ronan snorted. “No promises.”

“Don’t mind him, Anne,” Gansey said, waving off both Anne’s concern and Ronan’s derision, “just direct us to the place where you found Noah.”

Anne huffed out a sigh. Was she really going to do this? It seemed so disrespectful to the boy’s memory. “I didn’t go there from here. I went from school, so start by driving there.”

Gansey did as directed, quiet as no one in the car was open to small talk. Even silent, he seemed to give off an active, probing energy, as if just waiting for someone to start a conversation so he could share whatever was in his mind. Anne was usually like that, too, but something about these boys and Gansey’s insistence on speaking with her made her reluctant to open her mouth more than necessary.

The only words she spoke came when the road thinned to a dead end, the bike path curving away into the forest.

“Park here. We’ll have to continue on foot.” She unbuckled herself as she said it, not waiting for Gansey to fully stop the car. She kicked the heels of her hiking boots at the gravel alongside the bike path as she waited for the boys to join her.

With Gansey hovering behind her shoulder and Ronan and Adam trailing a few feet behind, they struck out along the bike path.

“What brought you out here, the day you found Noah?” Gansey asked, having gathered up enough courage to start a conversation. Either that or he had broken under the weight of the silence.

Anne was not about to tell this boy about hearing his name in another forest and the subsequent tarot reading that had led to her moody bike trip. All she said was, “I had a rough weekend. Needed to let out some stress. Exercise and nature always do the trick for me.”

“I’m sure it did not end up relieving much of your stress after all,” Gansey commented, a strange half-smile on his face as if they were friends and he was being cleverly genial.

“No, it did not,” Anne said in her surliest manner, curling her mouth down at the edges. The longer this went on, the less she relished retracing her steps to finding a decayed skeleton with a trio of sweater-clad Aglionby princes. Ronan and Adam were muttering to each other and even occasionally snickering. Was nothing sacred to them?

Anne tried to move a bit faster, to feel more aligned with the cool, mulchy forest air. They were getting to the area of the forest where she had moved more according to instinct and whim than any marked path. She continued forward and hoped she was remembering correctly.

Sure enough, a corner of the stone wall was soon in view, the collapsed structure waiting sullenly to be forgotten again. Anne stopped. Gansey walked right up to it, sliding his hand against the stone and looking so closely it was like he could decode some ancient language in the crags. He held up a device that Anne hadn’t noticed him holding before; it had a screen that was glowing, some kind of meter. He waved it from side to side as he walked the perimeter of the ruins.

Adam came up next to Anne. “This is where you found him?”

She jumped a little at his sudden presence. He had such a piercing gaze, as if he judged every muscle twitch in her reaction for verity. “No, it was a bit farther into the woods, out that way,” she said, pointing to the opposite corner. Adam nodded and moved toward Gansey.

Anne turned around to see Ronan still standing in the shadows of the trees, posed casually but displaying no desire to step closer to the ruins. She approached him with her arms crossed in a fragile imitation.

Ronan beat her to the punch. “Problem?” he sneered. Anne crossed her arms even tighter to refrain from literally punching him, settling for trying to transfer the fire from her face to his with her eyes.

“Just wondering what part you’re going to play in this if you can’t go any farther. Can you not step into a fairy ring?”

Ronan narrowed his eyes at her. “I don’t know what this place is, but I get a bad feeling from it, and that’s all I need to know.”

Anne was about to call him a coward, which may not have been well-advised, but she was robbed of the opportunity by Gansey.

“Anne! Which way did you say you went to find Noah?” he called, sounding far too excited to be pointed toward a crime scene. Anne sighed and strode back to the stone ruin, aware of Ronan drifting around it. She led the boys to the far corner and looked for a long moment at the tree line in front of her. She hadn’t followed a path; she had just gone forward as much as she could, and prayed that she would find her way back.

“There’s no path from here to there; I’m just going to follow as much as I can recognize. I got us this far, so it should be fine,” she said.

Gansey held his device in front of her. “We might be able to use this,” he said.

Anne turned to him with a doubtful eyebrow raised. “What exactly is this?”

“It’s an EMF reader. It measures energy. See how the needle is in the red right now?” Gansey pointed to the needle on the screen, which was pegged. “This ruin- I think the paper was right in assuming it was once a church- lies on a current of very strong energy. If we follow the direction of that energy, if my theory is correct, we’ll end up in the same place you found Noah.” 

It was a crackpot theory at best, but his eyes were lit up with confidence and hope, so Anne nodded and moved forward, slipping through the trees as well as she could remember. Every so often she glanced at Gansey’s EMF reader, saw that it was still pegged, and doubted its usefulness. Who knew what it was picking up on?

“How much farther are you going to take us?” Ronan asked, his voice too loud among the shushing leaves. It made Anne’s shoulders tense.

“I don’t remember how long I walked,” she said, softening her voice to keep from scolding him. “I wasn’t really paying attention. I kind of… tripped over it.”

She thought she heard Adam say under his breath, “Him.”

“I guess we should start looking down, then,” Gansey said, moving his eyes from the meter to the ground as he kept pace with Anne. She wished she could remember the spot where she had found the bones, but in a forest like this, she’d never be able to recall the exact placement of the trees, even without the haze of panic laid over the memory.

Gansey emitted a strange hum. Anne glanced over to see the EMF reader had gone blank. She snorted as he fiddled with the battery, still hoping the thing could be of actual use. She walked a few steps ahead and spotted a flash of unnatural yellow. Stepping forward, she saw it was a bit of police tape, left behind on the branch of a shrub.

“Don’t worry about that thing,” she said to Gansey, because his brow was still furrowed over his device, “we’re here.”

Gansey glanced at Adam and then at Ronan, but both shrugged unhelpfully. “This thing,” he said, haughtily displeased with Anne’s dismissal of it, “is what will tell us whether Noah was killed for a very specific reason or not.”

“A very specific reason?” Anne repeated. “As opposed to a serial killer or a bear?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Anne drew in a breath, preparing herself. “What would this specific reason be?”

Again, Gansey looked to Ronan and Adam. They looked back. He looked again at Anne. “How much do you know about Welsh Kings?”

Anne furrowed her brows tightly at the non sequitur. “Not much at all. How is that relevant?”

Gansey stared at her for a moment longer before answering. “Because I believe one is buried in this area. Owen Glendower.” He waved the EMF meter over the area, to no avail. It was still dead.

“Why would a Welsh king be buried in Virginia?” Anne felt Adam’s eyes on her, saw Ronan’s eyes on Gansey, keeping some kind of score of the conversation. It suddenly felt like her answers mattered a lot.

“Well, if he led an army in a civil war, his supporters might not have trusted their British overlords to respect his body if they got their hands on it. They wanted to keep it safe, because they believed he would rise one day and restore Wales to its former glory.”

“Oh,” Anne said, because now the tale sounded familiar. “Like the story of King Arthur. But what would that have to do with a boy who was murdered here?”

Gansey took a deep breath before he answered. “Because I believe we are standing on a ley line. A current of strong energy that can cause or strengthen supernatural phenomenon. And I believe that Glendower is sleeping somewhere along the Henrietta line. Congratulations Anne,” he said, flashing her a sheepish smile, “you just helped me find it.”

Anne felt horribly used, and there was no way in hell this rich prince of Virginia was going to get away with it. “You had me bring you out here, made me relive this very recent unpleasant memory, so you could, what? Go ghost hunting?”

Gansey winced at that. “Not exactly. Although, now that I’ve told you that, there’s something else you should know. Noah,” he nodded at the ground where there had been bones a few days ago, “is our friend.”

“Is your friend?” Anne said skeptically.

“Yes,” Adam spoke up, surprising her. “We know Noah. He’s been living with Gansey and Ronan for- I don’t know, a while.”

“He hasn’t been living for the past seven years,” Anne retorted, feeling her voice go rough. She was edging toward hysteria.

“And yet,” Gansey pressed, “We’ve seen him. We’ve spoken with him. Hung out with him like he was any normal guy. We just thought he was quiet, shy, awkward around people. Until you found his bones and he disappeared.”

Anne shook her head and began to pace in a circle. “You know, as crazy as this all sounds, I’m so glad you told me this and not his family. Thank goodness they don’t have to go through this. They have enough grief without hearing about their son being a ghost haunting a bunch of preppy boys with too much time on their hands.”

Gansey shook his head emphatically. Ronan was glaring at her poisonously. Adam approached her with his eyebrows bent in uncertainty.

“I know how it sounds,” Adam said softly in his Henriettan accent, stronger than that of the other two, “but the day after you found him, we saw him. In Gansey’s apartment, more faded and creepy than before, but still the Noah we recognized. We recognized him, Anne.”

She shook her head harder, on the verge of tears. “I don’t know why you’re doing this to me,” she cried. “I tripped over his bones, for God’s sake! Isn’t that enough torment?”

“Anne, no, I’m sorry,” Gansey sputtered, taken aback. “We’re not trying to torment you; we just want to get justice for Noah. We think the fact that his bones were taken away from here is the reason why he’s been appearing less, and weaker the past few days. This,” he held out the EMF meter, still dark, “tells me that that church is on a ley line-”

“This thing tells you nothing!” Anne said, swiping it from his hand and holding it over her head viciously. Gansey stared up at it like she was holding the sun in her hand. She turned it toward herself and looked up at the display.

It was pegged.

Gansey smiled brilliantly, victoriously. “We are on the line here. It was keeping Noah strong.” His face then fell to a shadowed expression. “And he was probably killed because of Glendower.”

“Why would anyone-” Anne began, but Gansey cut her off.

“Glendower is said to grant a favor to the one who wakes him. If Noah was looking for Glendower, and someone else was at the same time, the competition could have gotten ugly. It’s just a guess, but…” he glanced at Adam knowingly. “Seven years,” he finished.

Anne glanced between them until it became clear neither wanted to elaborate. “What happened seven years ago? Apart from Noah being killed?”

Gansey tilted his head in supreme discomfort. It seemed unfounded, since he was the one who brought it up. “I died seven years ago.”

Anne scoffed, hard and loud. “Are you a ghost too? Is that why you’re friends with Noah?”

“No,” Gansey said. There was a strange pleasure in hearing his voice unravel a bit. “I lived. I got stung by a hundred hornets and died of anaphylactic shock, but I lived. And when it happened, I…” he paused to look at her. He was probably trying to gauge if she would believe what he was about to say. She wasn’t feeling very inclined to.

“Well, I heard a voice,” he said finally. “‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.’ I think that someone else was Noah.”

Anne tried very hard not to believe it, but the way he said it, the prophetic intonation of the words, the perfect symmetry… it was all too perfect not to believe. Her romantic heart wanted it to be true, even if it was tragic. Gansey had been given a second chance at life, but Noah had been robbed of his own. The part of her that still resisted urged her to say that Noah should have lived, that it would have been fairer that way.

Instead she said, “Okay, assuming all of this is true, does that mean whoever killed him got the favor already?”

The question made Gansey look uneasy, like he hadn’t considered that until this point. “Hopefully not,” he said, failing to sound as certain as he wanted to.

“The bastard already got away with murder,” Ronan growled, “what more could he ask for?”

Anne looked sharply at Gansey then. “What do you plan to ask for?”

He looked startled by the question. “You know, I’ve had ideas here and there over the years, but… I think now, I want to ask for Noah’s life. If he was killed in the search for Glendower, then he deserves to have Glendower give him his life back.”

“Is that really a good idea?” Anne questioned him. “How do you bring someone back to life after their body has rotten down to the bones? After their bones have been discovered? After their family has grieved? After they were murdered?” She took a deep breath and pressed on. “If you were brought back to life after that, how would you go on?”

“She’s right,” said a feathery voice to her left. A pale, blond boy was standing in the patch of ground where the bones had been. Anne didn’t understand what she was seeing; this person had not been here when they arrived, but she hadn’t noticed his arrival either. She was very aware of the meter in her hand, glowing bright, bright red.

“Noah,” Gansey breathed, and Anne suddenly remembered the face in the paper of the boy whose body she had found. 

Her mind rebelled against it so hard she felt dizzy, like she might faint. But she remained standing as the apparition- she would not call him a ghost- made his way to her. God, she could barely tell whether or not his legs were moving, but he was definitely getting closer, eyes wide and anxious, head turned down and shoulders hunched, like a child being forced to say hello to a relative.

Finally, though maybe it had only been seconds, Noah Czerny stood faintly in front of Anne. She stared at his sad-puppy eyes and fully believed what she was seeing.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, tears spilling hot over her cheeks. This close, she could see the divot in his face where he was hit, where he killed. He was so young, so unassuming; how could anyone be so cruel as to kill this boy?

“Thank you,” he said, and his voice was so quiet, “for finding me.”

Anne sobbed, but she gingerly reached out her hand. She closed it on Noah’s shoulder, and he was cold, but he was solid, and although chills ran through her, she pulled him in and embraced him tightly. She held him until she was too cold and tired to keep her arms around him. After she wiped her eyes, she no longer saw him.

She was too tired to walk back. The journey to Camaro seemed like an eternity’s journey, so draining to think about that her knees buckled. Gansey and Adam caught her under her arms, and Ronan ended up tossing her over his shoulder like a hay bale and carrying her all the way back. She fell asleep almost immediately in the car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really happy with this chapter in particular. Noah is great to write, I love him so much.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	8. Back To School

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If there is one constant with Anne Shirley, it's that the kids she goes to school with are awful, and she always manages to attract their attention for the wrong reasons. Sometimes, of course, she loses her temper.

As much as she dreaded it, Anne had to go to school on Monday. The entire bike ride, her head was filled with scenes of the stone ruin and the surrounding forest, and the pervading chill of embracing the apparition of a dead boy. If she had felt out of place before, it was nothing to the way she felt now.

Diana swept her into a hug as soon as they saw each other. Anne felt as though she could melt with the warmth of it, and held on tightly. She didn’t say anything, for which Anne was infinitely grateful.

Especially when the first words out of Josie Pye’s mouth when she sat down for homeroom were, “So what did the body look like?”

She didn’t shout it, but she didn’t whisper it either, so multiple pairs of eyes swiveled to watch, ears following to listen. Anne raised her head and set as level a gaze she could manage on her classmate.

“Just bones in the dirt, Josie,” she said quietly. Only the closest students straining to hear could catch it, she hoped.

“He was wearing Aglionby stuff, right? I wonder if anyone knew the guy,” Josie prattled on.

“He died seven years ago,” Anne scoffed, “so unless he was your babysitter, you wouldn’t have known him.”

Josie scowled down at her. “I guess it wouldn’t matter to you, since you wouldn’t have known him no matter what. You were in Canada then, right? Still in the orphanage?”

Anne bristled, but controlled her voice. She just did not have the energy to explode at Josie today. “My first foster home, actually. The Thomases.” She remembered little of that time, and never made any attempts to remember more.

Josie smirked like she’d won something. “Did you find any dead bodies there?”

Anne only had time to roll her eyes before the bell rang and the school day began. Josie might have thought she’d gotten the last word, but Anne was relieved that she didn’t have to continue entertaining her. Ending the interaction, no matter how, was always a victory for her.

The rest of the school day didn’t go any better. Teachers gave her sympathetic, sad glances and patted her shoulder when she passed them by, and students who she was somewhat acquainted with asked her about the morbid details of her discovery. By the time lunch came around, she was considering slipping off to the bathroom to cry, but that didn’t really offer any privacy. Everyone would know it was her, cracking under the trauma.

And what they knew barely scratched the surface of the truth. She had to bear the reality of Noah being out there, somewhere, conscious but weak because she had caused his bones to be moved. He had been murdered, and while the police assumed it was a typical homicide, she had a gut feeling that Gansey was right, that it had something to do with the ley line.

At school, she was just the adopted girl who had found the body of a murdered Aglionby student, all because of her weird penchant for wandering in the woods.

At lunch, Diana rubbed her back, and Ruby squeezed her hand whenever she laid it down on the table. Jane tried to encourage her to keep her head up.

“You’ve handled this before, Anne, and it will pass,” she said. “You probably could have stayed home today, too, if you haven’t really processed things enough to be here. But now that you’re here, it’s best to get today over with. Grit your teeth, deal with it, and tomorrow will be better.”

“And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” Anne repeated miserably. “If they all think dead bodies are so cool, I invite them to go looking for one. I didn’t ask to trip over the poor boy.”

“You’re so sympathetic even to the dead, Anne,” Ruby said. “It’s amazing, really.”

“He didn’t deserve to die,” Anne responded quietly, not very uplifted by Ruby’s words. “You should have heard how his family talked about him. He was energetic, wild, playful… alive. And then he was dead, just like that. Such a good soul… he deserved so much more.”

She felt no need to say more. After a second of silence, Ruby changed the subject. “By the way, what ever happened at your visit to the psychics’?”

Diana brightened, ready to perform this lighter fare. “Oh, it was actually really fun. I got a love reading, and it was…” she licked her lips, searching for the right word and savoring the suspense, “promising.”

“Promising how?” Ruby demanded, leaning forward with a hungry smile. Diana smiled mischievously back.

“They told me that my true love is someone very similar to me, and that if I can establish the relationship and maintain it, we will be constant and happy,” she said proudly, summarizing the reading generously. Anne noticed she omitted the bit about temptations. Diana would never be likely to admit how many boys her eyes followed.

“Do you have any idea who it might be?” Jane asked, trying and failing to seem indifferent.

Diana smiled cheekily at this. “I have a hope, certainly, but that’s all I’m going to say.”

The girls voiced their protests, falsely indignant at being left to guess, but clearly entertained. Anne even found that her own mood had been lifted dramatically by the end of lunch. She could face the rest of the day. It was barely more than two hours that she had left.

She almost managed it. She really did. She got all the way to last period without breaking down into tears or an anxiety attack. Then Charlie Sloane tapped her shoulder with a pencil while she was working on a geometry proof.

“Hey Anne,” he whispered, “what were you doing in the woods when you found that body? Witchcraft? Necromancy, perhaps?”

All at once, the thread of her self control snapped. Turning halfway in her seat, she swung her notebook at his head. The soft looseleaf wouldn’t do much damage, but it was well packed enough to make a satisfying solid bonk on impact. The metal coil would also leave a mark where it sunk into his cheek.

“Anne!” Ms. Stacey called out from the front of the room, spotting Anne’s arm still outstretched with book in hand and Charlie holding a hand to his face pitifully. He was a far cry from the innocent tragedy of Noah Czerny, so Anne felt no sympathy.

“Step outside with me for a moment, Anne,” said Ms. Stacey, now standing over her desk. She guided Anne out of the classroom with a gentle hand on her back. Anne felt herself blushing, but she was not sorry.

“Anne,” Ms. Stacey said, “I know you had a rough time over the weekend, but you can’t lash out at your classmates like that. If you’re really having such a hard time dealing with all of it, why not talk to Mr. Murphy?” Mr. Murphy, the school’s counselor, was highly experienced with mitigating the anxiety of overachievers and referring suicidal teens to real psychiatrists. “I know he’s not exactly a grief counselor, but wouldn’t it help just to talk to someone?”

Anne shook her head. Who could she talk to who could put Noah’s bones back on the ley line? Who could tell her what monster could kill such a bright soul, even for a magical favor? “It’s not grief that I’m dealing with,” she finally said, “just shock. And being treated like a freak because I found a skeleton isn’t helping. It’s not like I killed him!”

Ms. Stacey tried to shush her, glancing back at the classroom door. “I know, Anne, it’s not fair. But you aren’t going to improve their opinion of you by smacking people with your notebook.”

Anne scowled. She couldn’t look Ms. Stacey in the eye. “He asked me if I was doing witchcraft with the body. Necromancy.”

Ms. Stacey sighed. “Let’s head back inside,” she said. “Try to keep your temper in check, no matter what anyone says.”

Anne nodded and followed her back inside, holding her head up all the way to hear desk even as she felt everyone watching. She met Charlie’s glare with an equal one before turning to sit down.

“Mr. Sloane,” Ms. Stacey said, more quietly and ominously than she’d spoken to Anne, “come with me, please. Take your bag with you.” She led him out of the classroom. When she returned a few minutes later, Charlie wasn’t with her. Anne suppressed a smile. She’d always liked Ms. Stacey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should have posted this weeks ago... This virus has me hiding my head in the sand of video games rather than doing anything productive.
> 
> Still, thank you for reading!


	9. Dreaming Trees

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first discovery of Cabeswater! It goes similarly, and then quite differently.

At the end of the day, Diana left Anne with another tight hug before running off to the bus. Anne sighed, feeling her shoulders drop as her chest deflated. One day down. She trudged over to where her bike was chained to a lightpost.

Just as she reached it, someone entered her peripheral vision, a shadow of hands tucked into pockets. For one delirious second, Anne thought that the ghostly Noah had visited her, but when she turned her head, it was only Gilbert Blythe. He rocked on his heels, looking at Anne like she might punch him if he opened his mouth. He must have heard about Charlie.

She took in a deep breath, fortifying herself for one more conversation. Gilbert was especially difficult; she always managed to say something stupid in front of him.

“Hello, Gilbert,” she sighed.

“Hey Anne, uh, I just wanted to,” he swallowed quietly, “ask if you’re okay.”

Anne smiled bitterly at her bike. “I’m as well as can be expected, I guess.”

Gilbert’s head bobbed in a nod, and he reached a hand to rub his neck. “Yeah. I guess I just want you to know that I’m here, if you need an extra shoulder to lean on. I’m your friend, you know?”

Anne let out a little laugh. It had been difficult sometimes, over the past year, to know if she and Gilbert were friends. If asked today, she may not have been sure. But hearing it from him warmed her heart. “Yes, I know, Gilbert. Thanks. I’m gonna need all the friends I can get the next few days, I think.”

“You handled today pretty well, all things considered. Charlie’s a dick, so he had it coming.”

Anne laughed out loud at that, enjoying the release and the sound of her voice bouncing between the trees. They were ever so slowly sprouting leaves.

A blaring car horn from right behind her startled Anne a foot into the air. She spun around and saw a sleek black BMW sitting in the parking lot. She knew no one in her class had a car like that. She rolled her bike in front of her defensively as the window rolled down.

In the driver’s seat, head shaved and eyes careless but sharp, sat Ronan.

“Are you getting in, Carrots, or do I have to wait all day?” he called. He smiled mirthlessly. Anne was done.

She strode up to the rolled down window and drew in a long, steady breath. Then she screamed into the car.

“You can wait all goddamn day and night for all I care, but if you make one more jackass comment about my hair, I will- I will-” she saw the victory in Ronan’s smirk as she reached for an appropriate threat, but she would not concede. “I’ll spit on this car every time I see it!”

It felt weak, weaker than it should have been, but if anything was sacred to Aglionby boys, it was their cars. Gansey nearly worshipped his mess of a Camaro. As it was, Ronan was genuinely frowning, as if contemplating whether Anne’s saliva would permanently stain leather.

“Who exactly are you?” Gilbert asked. Anne hadn’t noticed him walking up to her shoulder to lean in for a view.

“The Prince of Wales,” Ronan spat, “who are you?”

“I’m Gilbert Blythe, and if you’re harassing my friend-”

“I’m not,” Ronan cut him off. He turned his gaze back to Anne. “Now get in. You can put your bike in the trunk.” He demonstrated his word by unlocking the trunk and stepping out of the car to take Anne’s bike out of her frozen hands.

“Are you kidnapping me?” she asked, in an edged tone. “Because you’re not doing a very good job of it.”

Ronan walked right up to her, despite Gilbert’s valiant attempts to stay between them. Even hunched, he had a good couple inches on Gilbert, nearly a foot on Anne.

“Gansey’s waiting,” he said in a low voice. It wasn’t a threat, but Anne felt a chill go down her spine.

She made a show of sighing. “Sorry for the drama, Gilbert, but it seems like I really have to go.” At the look of genuine distress on her friend’s face, she added, “I’ll be fine, don’t worry. He only acts like a tough guy.”

Ronan snorted, but didn’t call her bluff. He seemed satisfied enough when they were both in the car and he was zooming onto the main road.

“Where are we going?” Anne asked, secretly hoping the distraction of conversation would force Ronan to slow down. It didn’t.

“Gansey’s been looking into that church,” Ronan explained, “or whatever it was you led us to. He wants to explore the rest of that mountain, look for signs of Glendower.”

“And I am necessary for this why?” Anne asked. Hadn’t she already given these boys what they wanted from her? Still, she thought of Noah’s appearance, his pitiful eyes, the smudge on his cheek. She was hardly going to return to normal life anytime soon.

Ronan just shrugged. “You got this started. That’s enough for Gansey.”

It seemed implicit that what was enough for Gansey was enough for him. Anne was quiet for the rest of the ride, until they stopped in the parking lot of what looked to be an abandoned warehouse. There was a helicopter on the far side of the lot, inexplicably polished next to the dilapidated building.

“This is not the place I led you to before,” Anne pointed out, wondering very suddenly if she’d put herself in real danger by trusting this guy. He certainly screamed danger more than the other two. Three. How much was Noah one of them? It would probably be rude to ask.

“No,” Ronan agreed, “This is Monmouth.” He parked the car and walked around to open Anne’s. He didn’t wait for her to get out before lumbering over to the chopper. Anne followed at what she hoped was a safe distance, throwing one glance over her shoulder at the building before deciding it wouldn’t help her at this point.

When she turned her eyes to the door of the helicopter, she saw Adam standing there, talking to Ronan. He looked at her briefly, without a change in his expression. He’d been expecting her, then. Once Ronan entered, Adam turned to speak to Anne.

“Have you ever flown before?” he asked her.

“I’ve been on planes a few times,” she answered, but it was obvious that a helicopter was not a plane.

Adam tilted his head back and forth, making some decision that only he knew about. “You should be okay, then, if you don’t mind flying in general. Better than me, anyway.” Anne wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t called attention to it, but his posture was definitely more tense than bracing against the doorway required. 

He backed further in so Anne could follow, and she spotted Gansey in a seat up front next to a woman in the pilot’s seat. He caught sight of her and smiled brightly, like a politician at a handshake line.

“Anne! Glad you decided to join us.” Anne thought “decided” was overselling it, but didn’t mention that. “This is my sister, Helen,” he continued, “and she’ll be our pilot today. Do you think you’ll be able to help us navigate to that church again? I’d like to go into the mountains from there.”

Anne took a blessed second to text Marilla that she would be home late, but would absolutely find the time to do her homework and her chores. She wondered if any of the boys in her company had to worry about such pedestrian things.

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly, “It was hard enough to find it on foot. Follow the bike path to the woods, then straight from there, I guess.”

Gansey nodded at her, then at Helen. “Strap in everyone, and put your headsets on. It’s going to be loud in here.”

Loud was an understatement. Anne was grateful for the headset’s barrier between her ears and the whirring blades above her. Even with that, she could feel the thrumming in every bone, ceaseless as they ascended. Her stomach dropped, wanting to obey gravity as much as she did. She found herself reaching out with her right hand to take hold of Adam’s left, looking for some comfort. Somehow she knew it wouldn’t come from Ronan.

Adam surprised her by holding her hand in return and squeezing it firmly. He was almost as tense as she was, and she recalled his words before she boarded. Neither of them wanted to be in the air right now.

A few minutes passed like that, wordlessly gripping Adam’s hand while clearing her mind of any thought beside breathing evenly and enduring from one moment to the next. There was little she could do about her heartbeat, pounding insistently like a police officer with a warrant. She just had to endure. It would go away. Eventually.

“Is that the church?” A clipped female voice came through the headset, making Anne jump in her seat. She realized it was their pilot, Gansey’s sister, Helen. She leaned just enough to see out the window, just enough to spot a wall of ruined stone before her stomach flipped and she nearly crushed Adam’s hand.

She saw Gansey looking back at her for confirmation, though he must be able to see it for himself. She nodded quickly, sloppily, curls of red fluttering in her vision.

“That’s it,” Gansey replied, his voice equally clipped, like he was reporting a backup on the interstate from the traffic chopper. “Take us due north from the far right corner.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Helen replied, with the air of one referred to as Your Majesty.

Sarcasm notwithstanding, Helen took them steadily north, and the ride was quiet as they entered the mountain range. Gansey kept his eyes out the window, scanning diligently for anything that stood out. Ronan had been looking out the window the entire time, but more lazily, as if he was watching passing cars on a family road trip. Adam kept glancing between Gansey, Helen, and Anne. Anne stared at her lap, avoiding as much of the windows as she could.

“What’s that?” Gansey said suddenly. The alert note in his voice got everyone’s attention. Even Anne risked a glance at the window, but she wasn’t sure what she saw. Some kind of path? A dirt road, maybe?

“Helen, can you take us down there?”

“It might be private property,” Helen warned.

“Please, Helen.” Gansey really did sound like he was pleading. It wasn’t even the polite insistence he’d used with Anne at Noah’s service. He needed to see what was down there.

After a tense moment of sibling telepathy, Helen relented. “You get five minutes before I fly off without you.”

“Five minutes.” Anne could hear Gansey’s smile over the headphones. “You’re the best, sister.”

“I know.”

When they landed, Anne couldn’t get out fast enough. She hit the ground with enough momentum to stumble, but she managed to stay on her feet. On her feet on solid ground. She had taken it for granted for too long.

When everyone was out, they approached the path that they had seen from above. Helen, having done her job as chauffeur, stayed near the helicopter.

The path was much wider than it had looked; several feet across and winding over a wide clearing on the face of the mountain. When Anne stooped to touch the chalky fragments just a second after Gansey, she realized she recognized them. Oyster shells weren’t uncommon finds on a Prince Edward Island beach, when she’d managed to find her way there as a child. But they weren’t anywhere near the coast.

“How did these get here?” she asked aloud.

“And who arranged them like this?” Gansey said beside her. She looked at him with an eyebrow raised.

“Like what? What did it look like from above?”

Gansey looked surprised for a second. “Ah, you were in the middle, right. Vertigo? I’m sorry, I should’ve given you prior warning. It looked like a raven.”

Anne was still processing his first two statements when the last hit her like whiplash. “A raven? Are you sure?” It did not escape her notice that ravens were the Aglionby mascot.

Gansey nodded in a far-off way. “I don’t know how I know, but it is definitely a raven. This is a marker.” 

“Ravens are symbolic for Glendower, right?” Adam asked. He was leaning over the two of them, not quite entranced enough to kneel in the cracked shells.

Gansey grinned an impossibly wide grin. “Yes, Adam. Yes they are. We’ve found the line. We’ve found it. We’ve found it!” He repeated it again, triumphant and glowing. He cast his eyes around for his next step, determined. Even Ronan smiled, a reluctant smile that wouldn’t admit it was there, but Anne saw how they had all been waiting for a moment like this. She thought about her daydreams of Princess Cordelia and thought maybe she had been waiting for this, too.

“Why did you bring me along?” she asked Gansey in a low murmur.

He looked surprised. He took a long moment before he answered. “The way the EMF reader behaved in that clearing. Seeing you with Noah. The fact that he appeared just like he used to when you were there. I’m not really sure what it all means, but I think you deserve to be a part of this.”

Anne would never admit it out loud, but the words warmed her inside. It was a rare occurrence that she felt so special, so integral to something.

“Can I ask you something?” Gansey said. At her nod, she continued. “What did I do to offend you?”

Anne blinked a few times, caught off guard. “What do you mean?”

“Well, at the service for Noah, you seemed very eager to leave,” Gansey said. He was staring at the shells. “You were also pretty displeased with me when you led us to where you found him. I thought I’d done something, but I can’t think of what.”

“Oh.” Everything had happened so fast that she had forgotten the initial shock of hearing Gansey’s name from Gansey himself, of seeing him in the flesh. The knowledge that he was doomed had already faded to a dull background humming in her mind.

“I’ve heard your name before,” she said. Should she tell him when, and what it might mean? He’d trusted her with unbelievable information. Maybe she owed him this, since it directly affected him if it was true. “I was outside in the middle of the night, just last weekend. I heard it on the wind, in your voice, I think. But there was no one there.”

Gansey was looking at her now, intensely but not with anger. He looked like a bloodhound that had caught a scent.

“Was this on the night of April 24, by any chance?” he asked.

“It… it was, actually. Why?”

“Because I have a recording of my name, in my voice, from that night,” he said. “St. Mark’s Eve.” Inexplicably, he smiled widely. How could he smile, knowing about St. Mark’s Eve? Didn’t he know what it meant?

“Where do we go from here?” Anne asked. She was certain she had been brought into all this for a reason. She had resisted, but no more. She was part of this now, all in.

“We go back,” Helen called. “You’ve had your five minutes.”

Gansey ignored her and scanned the area. Adam looked vaguely concerned that Helen might actually leave them there, but he said nothing of the sort. Ronan was near the trees, his stance suggesting that he was not being respectful.

“Water,” Gansey said, pointing to a place where the grass was divided by a stream that caught bits of light filtering down. “We’ll follow it as far as we can.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” Helen called out again. “Do you hear me, Dick! I’m taking off!”

“Five minutes, Helen!” Gansey called back, smiling, unapologetic, and completely confident he would get his way. And though Helen steamed, he followed the stream into the woods without resistance, Anne, Adam, and Ronan trailing behind.

Once they were properly in the woods, surrounded by trees, Anne felt a tingling that began at the base of her spine and ran out along her skin, raising the hairs on her arms. The trees around her looked ancient. More than that, they felt ancient. The very air felt full of secrets.

“I’m not sure if I’m awake anymore,” she murmured. “It would be no surprise for my mind to send me a dream of taking a helicopter to a forest where paths made of shells form ravens. I wouldn’t even complain if this was a dream. I’ll only complain if I wake up from it.”

“You’re not dreaming,” Ronan said. He sounded so definitive. He turned his head this way and that, looking at each individual tree like it insulted him.

“The ley line can mess with perception, though…” Gansey trailed off, pulling out his EMF reader and turning on the monitor. Immediately, it lit up red. “I think we’re all perfectly awake. And we’re on the right track.”

They continued on, following the water. The meter remained pegged. Anne began whispering to the trees.

“I know we’re trespassing in your home,” she said, brushing her hand along the trunk of a tall oak, her nails catching on the moss. “I hope you can forgive us. It is a beautiful place.”

As the trees rustled around her, she kept touching trunks, reaching up to branches, fingering leaves like they were swatches of silk. She whispered words of peace, of good intentions, of seeking permission and forgiveness. There was an oak so tall she stopped in her tracks to crane her neck and see where it disappeared beyond the canopy.

“Oh, hello, beautiful guardian,” she breathed, coming up to rest her palm against the wood. “Thank you for allowing our presence.”

A hand on her arm startled Anne out of her reverence. Adam pulled her back toward the stream. “Anne, you need to keep up,” he said. “We don’t want to lose each other here. Leave the trees alone.” He trudged ahead of her, clearly caught between annoyance and responsibility. The strange thing about Adam was that he seemed like he should be a kindred spirit, but somehow he wasn’t. And yet, Gansey was.

Regardless, Anne picked up her pace, and they continued following the stream in relative silence. The trees seemed to be rustling louder than before, but there wasn’t much of a wind reaching below the canopy.

Eventually Adam asked, “What time is it?” He was still worrying about Helen. Now that he brought it up, Anne was certain enough time had passed that Helen really might have left. She looked to Gansey as he pulled out his phone, then frowned at it.

“What time was it when we landed?” he asked. They glanced between each other, the blank looks enough of an answer.

“We got in the air a little after three,” Adam said, and checked the watch on his wrist. Anne crept closer to Gansey to look at his phone screen. If they had been in the air for about half an hour, the clock was stuck around the time they had landed.

But they’d been walking for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, right?

Gansey held up the meter next to the phone. Neither changed; the meter stayed red, and the clock remained at the same time even after a minute had surely passed.

“Should we go back?” Anne asked. “Won’t Helen be worried?”

Gansey looked upstream. Ronan was already standing further ahead, staring forward like a lookout. His entire body seemed to lean toward whatever destination they’d been approaching, and Gansey was oriented the same way.

“Just a little further,” Gansey said, and started moving again.

“Helen’s going to be pissed,” Adam said.

Gansey shook his phone at him once. “It hasn’t been five minutes yet.”

They stayed closer together now, all aware that the warping of time could be a threat. Anne knew nothing of ley lines, but she knew enough of fae and folklore to know that when one wandered into a place where time did not apply, one rarely made it out.

The trickling sound of the stream led them to a shallow pool housed in a bowl of mountain stone. The stream fell out where there was a crack in the bowl. The source of the water was most likely underground. A mountain spring.

“Is this what we’re looking for?” Adam asked, looking at Gansey. Anne didn’t know what they were looking for. His Welsh king could hardly be at the bottom of this lake, so she didn’t know why Gansey was gazing at it so intently.

Anne looked around, taking in the area of forest around them. Ferns and wildflowers spotted the banks, popping up anywhere enough of the spring water soaked into the soil. The trees stood in a regal circle, spreading as far as Anne could see. Ronan was standing to the side, his eyes locked on one particular tree.

It seemed to have been rotted from the bottom up. It was an oak, one that must have been imposing in its youth, but now seemed more like a wounded soldier, whose body came back from the battle but whose mind did not. It created a shadowed cavern within its trunk, just barely taller than a human. Anne drew closer to it. It was the only thing she had seen so far in this place that even approached ugly, yet there was still something about it that belonged.

“Well,” she said in a breath, and Ronan turned to her, but she wasn’t talking to him, “who are you, old boy? Seen better days, haven’t you?” She reached a hand to the bark when she was close enough to touch it.

“I wouldn’t,” said Ronan.

But Anne didn’t think that was fair. “I’m not going to judge you by the way you look,” she said. “I think you’re a fine tree just the way you are. I mean, with a space like this, you could even provide some poorer creature shelter from the elements.” With that, she stepped into the shadowed crevice.

She was back in the kitchen at home. Maybe she really had been dreaming, fell asleep at the table while doing homework. Matthew was opening an envelope, drawing out a paper printed with a logo and professionally addressed. Matthew’s face changed; it was the closest to anger Anne had ever seen him. His face was red, and then so, so pale, and he stood from his chair only to fall, a hand pressed to his chest-

“MATTHEW!” Anne screamed, pushing forward. She was back in the strange forest; the rotted tree was behind her; she was on her knees in the moist grass; she was crying. She breathed fast, uncontrollably, and she could not banish the sight of Matthew with his hand clutching his chest. Something was wrong, so wrong, and she needed to be with him, right now.

All three boys were crowding around her, asking what was wrong, but she couldn’t hear them, couldn’t answer. She didn’t know what was wrong, only that something was. Her head spun until one of them gripped her shoulders with hands like stone. Ronan.

“What did you see?” He asked. His voice was even, measured. He had warned her.

“Matthew,” she choked out. “My father. He was- He- His heart-” she couldn’t help it; she dissolved into sobs again. “I have to go home- I have to make sure he’s okay!”

The boys hauled her to her feet, and Adam supported her as they made their way back downstream. Anne wasn’t sure if the trees had stopped rustling, or if she simply couldn’t hear them over her sniffles and sobs.

Helen was ready to explode when they arrived back at the clearing, but one look at Anne defused her. She got them back to Henrietta in record time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This went from updating roughly every weekend to whenever I read something really good and need to progress my own story. I will try to be better about that, but this isolation is not helping. Hope everyone is doing well, and of course, thank you for reading.


	10. Balance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After what happened in the forest, Anne needs answers from an expert.

Anne managed to pass off her tearful reunion with Matthew when she got home Monday evening as a panic attack, remnants of the stress from finding Noah’s bones. She suddenly felt as if something terrible had happened, and couldn’t be reassured until she saw both Matthew and Marilla alive and well in the flesh. It was close enough to the truth.

The rest of the week passed in a haze. Anne barely heard the questions or the jokes lodged at her. What was high school hazing compared to having a vision of a loved one in danger?

The worst part was that she still didn’t understand the vision. She had no idea what had caused it, or what it meant. From the way Ronan had acted, it seemed like the tree was to blame, but that seemed so far-fetched in the artificial lights of the school. Yes, the forest had been strange. Yes, they had only kept Helen waiting for a handful of minutes when they had walked at least twenty each way. Yes, Anne had the vision just as she stepped under the rotten trunk. 

But there was still a chance, a good chance, that it really was the result of an overstressed brain. There had been enough concern about Anne’s mental state throughout the years to at least consider the possibility.

With all this swirling about her mind, it was a miracle Anne got through her classes intact. She had no mental space to devote to her peers’ jabs. She didn’t care how disappointed they were.

On Saturday, she went back to 300 Fox Way. The cloudy-haired Persephone opened the door. She smiled vaguely down at Anne, even though they were of a height.

“Oh, how lovely to see you again. Come in, come in. I’m making a pie.”

Anne followed her in, oddly comforted by the bustling noises of the house. With none of the sources in eyeshot, it seemed as though the house was moving itself.

“I’m not here for a reading,” she said, just to be clear.

“I know,” Persephone replied, “or I wouldn’t have started my pie. But you can help me finish it.”

Anne was relieved, though she’d never admit it aloud, to have a task. It seemed like it would be easier to lead into her questions. She slid right into place in the hodge-podge kitchen and began mixing filling, or flouring cutting boards, or forming strips of crust as Persephone instructed. The kitchen began to fill with the heavy smell of warm cherries and sugar.

Once the pie was in the oven, Persephone sat down at the table and gestured for Anne to do the same.

“Now would be a good time to ask your questions,” she said. Anne sat up a little straighter. Was she that obvious? Or was that how psychic powers worked? She still wasn’t sure how much she believed in such things, but if she’d had a prophetic vision herself, she wanted to know.

“Thank you,” she said by way of beginning. “I guess what I want to ask first is, is there a ley line in Henrietta? Do you know anything about it?”

“Yes,” Persephone answered, quick and calm. She gave no further information.

Anne worried her lip between her teeth as she mulled over her next question. “Can the ley line cause… visions? Does it make people psychic if they weren’t before?”

Persephone tilted her head. Her hair fell off her shoulder like a waterfall. “The ley line can cause many things to happen, psychic or no psychic.”

“Including visions?”

“Quite possibly.”

Anne had the distinct feeling that she was a river having a conversation with a rock. She kept getting diverted.

“I had a vision Monday afternoon, and I need to know if it was real,” she said. In a less certain tone, she added, “It might have been connected to the ley line.”

Persephone looked at Anne’s face for a long moment, then suddenly her eyebrows raised. She smiled faintly, but shook her head. “That place is beyond all of our sight,” she said.

“That place?” Anne echoed. Then she put two and two together. “You know about that forest? What does it have to do with the ley line?”

Persephone shook her head again. “It is hidden by the ley line, or at least that’s our theory. Like a light too bright to look directly into.”

Anne sat back in her chair with a storm in her chest. There was no doubt that the vision had something to do with the ley line, but it was beyond even a psychic’s reach. How would she know if it was a true omen or some kind of psychological attack?

“Is the ley line protecting that place? Does it not like humans?” she wondered aloud. Anything that would motivate it to show her a false image. As long as it was false.

“The ley line protects itself,” Persephone said, “but I wouldn’t presume to know its preferences. There are days I don’t like humans.”

Anne agreed with that. “Would it send a vision to warn someone to stay away?”

Persephone shrugged. For twenty more minutes, they talked, Anne trying multiple questions from multiple angles, Persephone calmly answering or not answering, taking one step aside from the question like a fish evading a net. It all added up to one big question mark.

Eventually, Anne had to lay her head on the table in defeat. “Can you just tell me whether or not I really saw Matthew having a heart attack?” Just voicing the question made her throat tighten with panic and tears. When Persephone remained silent, she lifted her head. Her black eyes stared at her, kind but sad.

“What would you do if it was real? That’s the question you need to answer,” Persephone said. “What would change if you knew?”

Anne didn’t want to answer that question. She didn’t want to think about it being real. She wanted to be told no, it was just her imagination, no, it was the ley line, no, Matthew was fine and he would always be fine.

There was only one question left that might yield her some kind of answer.

“Persephone, what does the ley line want?”

Persephone smiled at this question, a pleased little smile accompanied by a tilt of the head. “Hmm… It is hard to say. The ley line doesn’t think in human concepts, but if I had to pick one, I’d say…” she tapped a finger to her lower lip, her face frozen in a starry smile while she thought. “Balance.”

The oven timer went off, startling Anne. Persephone rose smoothly and donned oven mitts to take out the pie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you for reading!


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